House Republicans are trying to cut $4 billion from the $80 billion-a-year food stamp program. Conservative critics argue the program has become bloated. But President Obama has threatened to veto such a bill.

Program is the right size

One in seven Americans is on food stamps? That sure sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? Maybe too many?

Well, consider this: The Census Bureau this past week unveiled its annual measurement of income in the United States. It turns out that 15 percent of Americans are living in poverty. If you care to do the math on that, 15 percent more or less equals a ratio of one-in-seven. In other words, the food stamp program appears to be precisely as large as it needs to be.

In fact, you could argue it needs to be larger. Panera Bread CEO Ron Shaich is spending this week eating on $4.50 a day — the amount of money provided by the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. Guess what? He’s pretty hungry.

“When is my next meal?” Shaich wrote in his blog this week. “How much food is left in my cabinet? Will it get me through the week? What should I spend my remaining few dollars on? What would I eat if I had no budget at all?”

Which makes Tim Huelskamp’s comments about “able-bodied adults” receiving food stamps sound rather foolish. After all, one needs food — enough food — in order to be able-bodied. There’s a chicken-and-egg concept that he and many Republicans seem unwilling to grasp.

The latest debate over food stamps occurs, in fact, in the wake of a series of strikes against fast-food chain restaurants, strikes conducted by “able-bodied” employees who find themselves unable to pay their bills and feed their families on the wages they earn — and unable, absent drastic action like a strike, to negotiate a higher wage for their labor.

Conservatives protest when government provides food for American families to survive. And they protest when private businesses are pressured to pay the kinds of wages that would help American families survive. What’s left? We can’t all be millionaires and business owners.

Must people at the bottom starve? Given conservative policy preferences, maybe so.

— Joel Mathis

No middle ground?

Why must the liberal policy option always be a choice between staying the course with a vast and ever-expanding, multibillion-dollar federal government program and mass starvation? Is there no middle ground?

The Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program happens to be among the largest and most retrograde of federal welfare programs. Its budget exploded from around $20 billion in 2000 to $85 billion last year. Not coincidentally, the program was among the few left untouched by the 1996 welfare reform law, which sought to limit welfare dependency by imposing time limits and work requirements.

Welfare reform succeeded in part because incentives work. Food stamps are one of the rare federal programs with relatively few strings attached. As Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation observes, nearly half of food stamp recipients have been on the program for eight years or more. Many of those people could work, but don’t.

“Altogether, each month, some 7 million to 7.5 million work-capable households received food stamps while performing no work or working less than 30 hours per week,” Rector notes. “These low levels of work are not simply the product of the current recession: They are typical of food stamp recipients even in good economic times.”

Knowing that, imposing some sort of minimal work requirement would seem obvious. But at the moment, requiring work in exchange for food stamps is optional among the states.

If Democrats’ lament about cutting food stamps sounds familiar, that’s because it is essentially the same apocalyptic claim they made about welfare reform almost 20 years ago. No less than Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat who famously exposed the links between poverty, welfare dependency, and family collapse in the 1960s, predicted that the 1996 welfare reform would lead to “millions of children [joining] the ranks of the homeless trying to get a little warmth by sleeping on the grates in our city streets.”